You could probably monitor the DOS VM to scrape camera/object matrices, render the static world in a huge GL (or what have you) display list, and then the other objects. The mesh formats were reverse engineered long ago.
The engine only copied pixels from fast main RAM to slow VGA RAM when they changed value, so using flat shading for most of the objects was a necessity for performance. IIRC all of the planes used Gouraud shading.
Video ram is still slow if you're accessing it from the CPU! Doing software 3D didn't really let you make use of whatever (limited) acceleration video adapters had at the time, which were mostly aimed at accelerated lines and moving rectangles around (you know, things that are useful if you're Windows). That meant the CPU was having to calculate everything and then push pixels over the bus.
This was why people were willing to use things like the VESA Local Bus, basically an extension of the 486 bus usually used to drive a graphics card and starting at a heady 100MB/sec. Terrible idea (it got faster as your CPU bus got faster, and if your card couldn't deal with that you'd have to underclock your CPU), but until graphics hardware started offering operations that matches what game developers wanted, the number of pixels you could push over that bus per second was genuinely a limiting factor.
My understanding is that the double buffering was done in RAM (instead of VRAM). He did it by keeping the two last frames in EMS/XMS, calculating the delta, and copying only the parts that had changed from RAM to VRAM during VBLANK.
I really like my old 2010 pictures on my Canon PowerShot, I wish I had shot in RAW mode. I even miss my iPhone X, the AI upscaling has gotten out of hand.
I honestly like my photos more from my iPhone 3 than my current iPhone SE. The photos were blurry, noisy, and crunchy while my current photos are just flat and without character. It's not nostalgia for me, it's the photos looking too good and a bit plastic.
It's difficult to impress how cool it was to have a open world flight sim / 3D movie editor in 1995. There's not much like it even today; GTA V's movie editor is close. A small "scene" grew up around it, and there were lots of mods/hacks in the 2000s: https://armknechted.com/sicentral/newpage/hacksi.html
I've noticed that LLMs have a hard time remembering all the constraints of 8-bit programming. Like sometimes it assumes that 6502 registers can have a value above 255, or in C it assumes that ints have 32/64 bits.
Good riddance. Crosswalks at intersections are nearly obsolete due to the thick A-pillars in modern cars. I would rather have mid-block crosswalks with warning lights and traffic calming devices.
A-pillars are the pillars of a car that support the windshield and the front of the roof. They've gotten bigger in recent years - which reduces the visibility of pedestrians, cyclists, and other cars. Drivers can't see through pillars. Big pillars are safer for the driver in case of a collision or a rollover, but paradoxically also makes that car more dangerous for everyone else on the road. I don't think they make crosswalks obsolete, but crossing the road is more dangerous today than it was 50 years ago.
Your citation blames the size of vehicles for the increase in danger, not A pillars specifically. And the demonstration was how many children could be sitting in front of a pickup truck before the driver could see them.
> “They are larger, heavier and higher up from the road than smaller cars and create blind spots that make it challenging for drivers to see vulnerable road users like pedestrians and cyclists,”
I drive a car with enormous A pillars (coupe version of a convertible) and never have issues seeing the children playing in the street because of it. Likely because most 8 year olds would be at eye level with me.
A modern F150 however, an entire car could be obscured by the long, high hood of those.
> But cross walks have nothing to do with that really?
The posted article mentioned accidents specifically at cross walks.
> The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found that drivers of SUVs, pickups, vans, and minivans are “substantially more likely” than car drivers to hit pedestrians when making turns,
The reasoning though is mainly speculation. I've found that minivans offer exceptional visibility. So it could be as simple as people who buy SUVs, minivans, and pickups are just worse drivers than those in coupes and sedans.
My theory is that people just don't consider pedestrians when making left turns at intersections with cross walks. Instead, they focus on oncoming traffic and commit to a turn before looking at where they are going.
